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Ask HN: Should "I asked $AI, and it said" replies be forbidden in HN guidelines?

882 points embedding-shape | 1 comments | 09 Dec 25 16:02 UTC | HN request time: 0.196s | source

As various LLMs become more and more popular, so does comments with "I asked Gemini, and Gemini said ....".

While the guidelines were written (and iterated on) during a different time, it seems like it might be time to have a discussion about if those sort of comments should be welcomed on HN or not.

Some examples:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46164360

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46200460

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46080064

Personally, I'm on HN for the human conversation, and large LLM-generated texts just get in the way of reading real text from real humans (assumed, at least).

What do you think? Should responses that basically boil down to "I asked $LLM about $X, and here is what $LLM said:" be allowed on HN, and the guidelines updated to state that people shouldn't critique it (similar to other guidelines currently), or should a new guideline be added to ask people from refrain from copy-pasting large LLM responses into the comments, or something else completely?

1. slowmovintarget ◴[10 Dec 25 00:46 UTC] No.46212698[source]▶
While I'd certainly prefer raw human authorship on a forum like this, I can't help but think this is the wrong question. The labeling up front appears to be merely a disclosure style. That is, commenters say that as a way of notifying the reader that they used an LLM to arrive at the answer (at least here on HN) rather than citing the LLM as an authority.

"Banning" the comment syntax would merely ban the form of notification. People are going to look stuff up with an LLM. It's 2025; that's what we do instead of search these days. Just like we used to comment "Well Google says..." or "According to Alta Vista..."

Proscribing quoting an LLM is a losing proposition. Commenters will just omit disclosure.

I'd lean toward officially ignoring it, or alternatively ask that disclosure take on less conversational form. For example, use quote syntax and cite the LLM. e.g.:

> Blah blah slop slop slop

-- ChatGippity